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2017 was an exciting year, especially for marketers and business owners. We are living in such an incredible time that few realize that only a few years ago we didn’t have things like Canva and DesignBold and had to hire an actual designer. Even worse, before Fiverr came along we had to meet designers face-to-face, get overcharged, sign lengthy contracts – a day in a marketer’s life was an absolute mess.
That’s why so many people chose to either hire in-house designers or specialists in different fields or probably why degrees were so much more highly valued than they are today.
So in this era of incredible tools that can do absolutely everything for you, we decided to write about a few marketing tools that absolutely blew our minds this year, and are important to remember for 2018.
Here they are:
1. LinkedHelper
LinkedHelper is the #1 tool for LinkedIn automation. This Chrome extension can literally do everything for you on LinkedIn and without your help. It can connect you to 50 people each day, it can endorse all of your contacts, it can send out a mass message to all your followers and ask them to join your LinkedIn group and it can get you more recommendations on your profile page.
2. Grouply
Grouply is an incredible tool that allows you to scrape Facebook groups. When you click on a group, go the "members" tab and turn Grouply on. This Chrome extension will then extract every single person that is a member of that group and provide you a nice Excel file with their names and occupations. You can then use a plethora of other tools to get their email address, LinkedIn profile, etc.
This is one of the only Facebook scraping tools that I have seen work. So I would highly recommend you use it.
3. Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach is one of the most brilliant ways to do blogger outreach, get contact lists of influencers, or simply run automated outbound email campaigns. Here at Eclincher we used this tool and get over 80% open rates on our emails and were able to create over a hundred connections with famous bloggers in the industry.
4. Snappa
Snappa is a design platform that is specifically geared for marketers. Yes, I know that all of them say that (Canva and DesignBold included). What you can create with Snappa is entirely different.
This tool has a huge variety of templates for blogs images, social media banners, and posts of all kinds, that are easy to use and look great. They have a variety of styles that are so easy to change up and make your own. I highly recommend this tool. We use it every month here at Eclincher and our blog images are looking better than ever (have you noticed)?
5. Resume.io
Resume.io is the place to go when it comes time to update your resume. They have really incredible templates and you can even create a separate resume for each job that you are applying for. It’s easy to plug in different elements, drag and drop everything, and you even get a score on each resume to help you improve.
The best part – they have resumes that come in pink. Here is one I created:
You can add things like skills, references, education, awards, and more. You can also create cover letters in the same styles as the resume templates.
6. MailShake
MailShake is the #1 automated email campaign tool. Simply drop your contacts in, create a drip campaign using their brilliant templates, and you have yourself an automated email marketing machine!
I used this tool with a number of companies and I get over 70% open rates every single time. The best part is that if you use their closing templates you get a response from a really high number of recipients. In our last batch, we got a 30% response rate.
Here is one of my favorite reviews of MailShake that walks you through creating a campaign, using the templates, and tracking your results. It’s done by yours truly.
7. HubStaff
HubStaff is a great tool for remote teams. It provides a system by which you can time your remote workers, pay their wages, and track their progress on each project you assign to them.
The way this works is your employee logs into the system and the system starts timing their work. You also get random screenshots of their computer during the shift, so you know exactly what they are working on. It provides a more efficient way to track their progress as well. The employee can choose projects from a drop-down menu, so you can see how much time they worked on each one.
At the end of the month or billing cycle simply go to their easy-to-read graph and you can even pay your employee from the system itself. The whole thing is brilliant.
You know what you are missing? Project management.
8. Nuvro
Nuvro is one of the simplest and easiest to use project management software that I have ever seen. It’s super easy to set up and their UI is really simple so no one gets lost in paperwork ever again (literally, cause it’s all online – get it?).
There is a tab to organize everyone’s calendar, a tab for working on documents together, a tab for organizing tasks in each project that your team is working on, and more. The best part is that it’s super affordable.
If you are just starting out and recently assembled a team, or even if you already have an established business, it’s never too late to organize some key processes. Use Nuvro to organize your life so you don’t get any headaches later.
